‘DOJ Cannot Run Roughshod Over Longstanding Laws’

Hello, and welcome back to The Franchise! We are starting off with some good news for a change — and, potentially, the end of one of the Trump Justice Department’s egregious overreach campaigns. For now. 

Ed Martin Tells All (Sort of)

President Donald Trump is, apparently, being advised on the midterms by former Colorado elections clerk Tina Peters. The two met Monday at the White House.

Peters was convicted in 2024 of a series of state crimes related to a plot to undermine the results of the 2020 election. Colorado’s Democratic governor then commuted her sentence earlier this year amid a pressure campaign by Trump.

After the meeting on Monday, former DOJ official and longtime conservative gadfly Ed Martin helpfully blabbed about what the two discussed, enthusing to the MAGA news outlet Real America’s Voice he was “going to break some news.”

“There is local control,” Martin said of U.S. elections. “However, the laws that govern the system, like safety and national security, are federal laws. So Tina Peters, famous Colorado clerk, was in the Oval Office today just two hours ago talking about this question. The president’s taking it seriously.”

Martin claimed that voting machines are compromised by foreign governments (a familiar, baseless allegation), and suggested that Peters and the president were discussing what he could do about it.

“If the Congress won’t pass the Save America Act, and they won’t, the president’s going to have to do what he’s going to do,” Martin said. “And it’s not a local issue when it’s national security, and it’s clearly national security. So we’ll see how it plays out. But again, four weeks from today, we have an election that has to be safe, has to be secure.”

Martin, of course, is not the most reliable narrator. The Jan. 6 organizer-turned-pardon attorney was ousted from the DOJ after Todd Blanche reportedly became extremely annoyed with his grandstanding. So, though ABC did independently confirm the news of the Trump-Peters meeting, take Martin’s description of what occurred with a grain of salt.

After the meeting, Trump spoke to the press, making seemingly contradictory statements about mail-in voting. “Vote by mail or vote in person. I’d rather have a vote in person. But they can vote by mail if they want, because we seem to have no choice,” he said, adding his usual claim that “there is a lot of cheating in vote by mail.” He did not, however, announce any new, election-related plans.

It’s also not terribly clear from Martin’s description what he and Peters want the president to “do.” Activists in their world have at times tried to pressure Trump to declare a national emergency, and, while that could stoke the chaos in which Trump thrives, experts say it wouldn’t give him any new authority over elections which, as Martin acknowledged, are run by the states.

Everybody’s Thinking About What a Democratic Senate Majority Would Mean for a Supreme Court Vacancy

The big news, as Kate Riga wrote for TPM, came yesterday, with Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito insisting to Bloomberg Law that he did not plan to retire in the last months of 2026 should Democrats retake the Senate.

• Ever since both Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas — the furthest right, and oldest, justices on the Court — declined to retire at the end of the Court’s last term, speculation has run rampant about whether they might swiftly step down in late 2026, allowing the White House to work with the Republican-controlled Senate to confirm a similarly right-wing successor before Democrats, potentially, take over.
• Democrats, for their part, are taking a page from Mitch McConnell’s playbook and mulling the possibility of refusing to confirm Trump’s nominee for any opening on the Supreme Court during the last two years of his term. “We’ve got to do exactly what McConnell did to us,” Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) told NBC, one of several Democrats to express that sentiment.
• Republicans, meanwhile, told Politico they are ready to spring into action, though they doubted they would need to. If a justice has plans to retire, “They would have done it already,” Thune told Politico.